7/7 and connective memory: Interactional trajectories of remembering in post-scarcity culture

The 2005 London bombings is both marked by and is a marker of a post-scarcity memorial-media boom. There is a new contagion of the past driven by a memorial culture unstoppably equipped with the availability, portability and pervasiveness of digital devices, enabling the instant aggregation and archiving of everything. The ‘digital’, it can be said, insinuates itself in the past. In such circumstances, what are the prospects for the development and maintenance of individual memories? And, how can we consider such questions beyond the traditional dichotomous models of memory that assume memory as an orientation to something once complete and residual, and thus always already partial and in decline? This article employs a concept of ‘connective memory’ as a sensitizing tool to highlight the moment of connection as the moment of memory. Through examining the archival (institutional) and individual remembrances of the London bombings, I treat ‘memory’ as a trajectory of connections that contribute to but also collide with the emergent post-scarcity memorial-media boom.